Yep, there's a lot of spam lately

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 9:31 am

Fortunately, most of the modifications so far have been managed via AutoMod, which is way better on phpBB3 than EasyMod was on phpBB2. I don't get why phpBB3 still doesn't come with AutoMod preinstalled, but whatever.

Post by **Lunkhead** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 10:22 am

Yes, thanks fluffy for tackling this issue, much appreciated.

JonPorobil · Post by **JonPorobil** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 3:50 pm

Lunkhead wrote:Yes, thanks fluffy for tackling this issue, much appreciated.

Indeed. I didn't mean to sound ungrateful about the loss of the Green theme. Way to take the initiative and run with it!

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Mon Sep 12, 2011 4:52 pm

Glad to do whatever I can to stop getting all sorts of annoying topic reply notifications en masse. (Short of banning BLT, I mean.)

Billy's Little Trip · Mon Sep 12, 2011 11:57 pm

fluffy wrote:Glad to do whatever I can to stop getting all sorts of annoying topic reply notifications en masse. (Short of banning BLT, I mean.)

Oh stop....

hillbilly · Post by **hillbilly** » Sat Sep 17, 2011 9:38 pm

my mother bought some today, flipped me out. i thought we were doing better.

Denyer · Post by **Denyer** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 7:24 pm

We ticked over to 163000 total posts today.
The one I done it with was post #167586 does that means 4586 have been deleted or is there something else that goes into the difference?

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 7:45 pm

A lot of those were spam, and the number also counts posts that people deleted themselves.

Post by **Lunkhead** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 8:28 pm

We need a sign somewhere that says "Spam free for N days". Seems like N is a larger number now than it got to for a while before the changes you made, fluffy, so thanks again, and thanks to the FMs for delegating the task.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 8:31 pm

Well, BLT and Denyer are still posting... but yeah, looks like the spamhammer mod did its job. Awesome.

Billy's Little Trip · Post by **Billy's Little Trip** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 9:25 am

I didn't want to post this in the review thread. But on my car site, we have a "ride of the month" competition. In order to vote, a person has to have 50 posts or a member for 30 days. It keeps the voting to the community members.

Post by **Lunkhead** » Fri Mar 08, 2013 9:03 am

Yo dawg, I heard you like spam on your PHPBB. Any idea what's going on with the spam lately, forum admins?

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Fri Mar 08, 2013 9:24 am

No idea. This new batch of spammers is especially obnoxious because they're only posting text rather than including any links, so there isn't any way for the current antispam stuff to filter them out. The text seems to be completely random snippets of stuff without specific keywords that can be filtered on, and I think they're just trying to fly enough crap below the radar to get past the existing minimum-posts-before-posting-links threshold. I can see if I can tweak the settings but I can't think offhand of anything that would legitimately filter out spam that wouldn't also get legitimate "I'm new here!" posts, or at least nothing easy to implement with how phpBB is set up. Maybe I can configure it to restrict new users from creating new topics or something, but then that just makes the moderation burden even more difficult.

Back on the old forum I had some hacks that prevented people from registering to begin with (by forming a score from the various cues that indicate spammer behavior) but I don't think any of those techniques work in this day and age. Unfortunately, phpBB doesn't keep good enough logs for me to tell if there's just an IP range I should be banning or what.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Fri Mar 08, 2013 9:32 am

Okay, I've added another level of antispam to the registration, namely it asks randomly-selected trivia questions which would be really easy for someone to answer if they have a reason to be here but would hopefully slow down spammer registrations.

Post by **Lunkhead** » Fri Mar 08, 2013 11:17 am

Cool, thanks fluffy. Hopefully that will help keep this new horde of spammers at bay.

roymond · Post by **roymond** » Fri Mar 08, 2013 12:10 pm

fluffy wrote:No idea. This new batch of spammers is especially obnoxious because they're only posting text rather than including any links, so there isn't any way for the current antispam stuff to filter them out. The text seems to be completely random snippets of stuff without specific keywords that can be filtered on, and I think they're just trying to fly enough crap below the radar to get past the existing minimum-posts-before-posting-links threshold.

Just move those posts to the lyric thread.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Tue Mar 08, 2016 3:58 pm

wellp that's an ironic spampost. sigh.

Post by jb » Tue Mar 08, 2016 10:05 pm

Yeah I've deleted like six spam accounts in the last couple days

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Tue Mar 08, 2016 10:52 pm

yeah there were another three today, this is getting ridiculous

Post by jb » Wed Mar 09, 2016 12:44 pm

I just deleted two more accounts, then banned *.ru and another domain, and changed the registration challenge to an aggravating "type the text in the image" thing.

JB

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Wed Mar 09, 2016 1:15 pm

The thing is that the "type the text in the image" thing is even easier to break than the community-question CAPTCHAs. I'd been changing the questions around a bit with the hope it would help.

I mean I guess the questions only have to be broken once and then the spambots can just be trained with them so maybe the image-text ones are the better approach. I guess we can just see if that helps.

It'd be nice if we could have more than one enabled at once...

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Wed Mar 09, 2016 1:23 pm

Oh I guess I should also get around to reinstalling the SpamHammer mod we were using before.

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